Rebel without a pause: Trump forged a frenetic first year

President Trump kicked off his first year back in office with an Inauguration Day for the record books, signing 26 executive orders that erased much of his predecessor’s legacy and began his quest to remake the federal bureaucracy in his image.

The torrential pace of action has slowed but has outdone that of all his predecessors for sheer frenzy.

In the first year of his second term, Mr. Trump has solved the border crisis, slapped tariffs on the entire world, signed a bill to continue his first-term tax cuts, launched a campaign to carry out “mass deportations,” ushered out more than 200,000 federal employees, shuttered some government agencies, brokered a fragile peace deal in the Gaza Strip, authorized military strikes on Iran’s nuclear program, and arrested Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro on drug charges after weeks of hitting smugglers’ boats.

He has repaired military recruitment, bulldozed the East Wing of the White House and dethroned The Associated Press from its perch as the pinnacle of media coverage of the White House.

“Certainly, he’s more frenetic than previous presidents. That seems clear,” said Andrew Busch, associate director at the Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the University of Tennessee. “He has quite a bit of a showman to his character. I think he’s determined to win every news cycle. I think he’s determined to be the No. 1 subject in every news cycle.”

Save for the glaring example of the border, where illegal immigration has ceased, the flurry of activity hasn’t necessarily translated to accomplishments, said one Republican official who worked in the first Trump White House.

“The pace of actual changes hasn’t been that torrid. The amount of noise has been deafening, making it difficult to think,” he said. “Spending remains the same. Taxes remain the same. The regulatory structure remains the same. When we cave on the tax credits that make insurers rich, health care will remain the same. Our foreign policy remains pretty much the same.”

“If the president brought the same kind of focus to policy changes that he has brought to remodeling [the White House], he’d be the most consequential president in our lifetimes. But that is clearly not to be,” the official said.

Mr. Trump’s outside-the-box approach has kept the federal courts busy.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where many of the major challenges to Mr. Trump have been filed, notched a record caseload last year, with more than 4,300 civil cases filed as of mid-December. The court had never before topped the 4,000 mark.

The judges have bedeviled the president with hundreds of restraining orders and injunctions blocking his policies.

He has received somewhat better results at the circuit appeals courts and dramatically better at the Supreme Court, which has enabled him to pursue aggressive immigration arrests and deportations, fire heads of independent agencies and withhold some government spending.

Take Mr. Trump’s move to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development. After an initial court blockade, the agency’s employees were recalled from abroad, and those at its headquarters in Washington were removed from their offices.

The Partnership for Public Service reported that, as of Nov. 18, more than 200,000 civilian government employees had left the federal workforce. The majority departed in July and August, according to the partnership’s data.

A percentage of those employees worked in the area of diversity, equity and inclusion, which was a focus of the Biden administration but is anathema to the Trump team. Mr. Trump moved to fire employees, remove DEI-infused language from federal communications and eliminate DEI carve-outs in government programs.

At the White House, Mr. Trump has embarked on controversial construction and challenged the primacy of AP, relegating the storied wire service to the same status as newspapers.

Elsewhere, he has won legal settlements from ABC News and Paramount, the parent company of CBS News. He watched with glee as CBS announced the end of Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” and ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel, though that network quickly retreated and offered him a new deal that will last through 2027.

At least four impeachment resolutions have been formally introduced against Mr. Trump in the House, and two of those — both from Rep. Al Green, Texas Democrat — have had votes in the full House chamber. Both were defeated.

Seven impeachment resolutions were filed against President Biden in 2021, though Republicans didn’t force a floor vote on any of them.

Gallup’s polling has shown Mr. Trump steadily losing the approval of voters. His job approval rating has fallen from 47% at inauguration to 36% in November, nearing his all-time low of 34% as he left office in January 2021.

Mr. Busch, the political scientist at the Baker School, said Mr. Trump’s pace of action has upsides and downsides.

Bad news for Mr. Trump is quickly subsumed by the next crisis or accomplishment. Good news also doesn’t linger, denying Mr. Trump the victory laps he is so eager to take.

He pointed to Mr. Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, which dominated headlines for the first months of the administration, making grandiose claims about cuts to government.

Mr. Busch said Mr. Trump isn’t the first president to create a task force or commission to reimagine the bureaucracy. Vice President Al Gore led one in the 1990s, and President Reagan had the Grace Commission. Those took months or years to develop recommendations to send to Congress. They were debated, and some parts were passed.

“In this case, you had this DOGE created, and it conducted its businesses in this frenetic way, and they kind of disappeared,” Mr. Busch said. The president’s order creating DOGE envisioned it operating through July 4, 2026.

That effort, like so much of Mr. Trump’s other work, was unilateral. Other than the One Big Beautiful Bill Act this summer and the Laken Riley Act last January to require detention of some illegal immigrants, little of Mr. Trump’s agenda has gone through Congress.

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and a longtime voice in Washington conservative circles, called the budget law’s tax cuts the “biggest affirmative win” of Mr. Trump’s first year.

Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive and New York governor hopeful, added to that list border security, peace deals and lower energy prices.

“He’s accomplished more in 11 months than most presidents have done in eight years. So he’s tireless. He has shown a strength and fortitude that is almost superhuman,” Mr. Blakeman said.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt ticked off the economy, securing the border and Mr. Trump’s makeover of the bureaucracy.

“Every day is a challenge when you’re up against fake news and the Democrats, but I think the president has accomplished what he said he was going to accomplish in just record time,” she said.

Mr. Norquist said he wished Mr. Trump had taken a different approach with tariffs. He said they were supposed to be a negotiating tool but instead became an economic hindrance.

Democrats who spoke to The Times credited Mr. Trump for the Gaza peace deal and the return of hostages, including some Americans.

Their list of objections for the first year was extensive.

“I think they’ve missed a lot of incredible opportunities. I wish there wasn’t a big beautiful bill. For me, one of the lows was shutting our government down. For me, that was very, very distressing to be at that point because that’s a fail,” said Sen. John Fetterman, Pennsylvania Democrat.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer, New Jersey Democrat, also cited tariffs, rising prices of services such as child care, and the lack of action on health care.

Analysts compared this first year with Mr. Trump’s first term and said he came in more ready, with a more unified team.

“He may have wanted to be as active in his first term, but he was really restrained in some ways by the fact that he didn’t really know Washington and a lot of folks in his administration were deeply tied to the Republican establishment,” Mr. Busch said.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told The Times that Mr. Trump assembled a much stronger team this time, fueling the historic year.

“I think he’s doing so many different things that I think it’s very hard for a normal person to understand the larger picture because every day, we have three or four new things,” Mr. Gingrich said.

• Jeff Mordock and Kerry Picket contributed to this report.